I try not to cuss a lot on this feed, but holy fucking shit gang. Dead Planet. Holy shit.

Dead Planet is the first module for Mothership, which I posted yesterday. Basically, if you’re going to buy one, buy the other. Every single question the main rules left me with – essentially, “what do I do with this?” – is resolved by reading Dead Planet. Resolved spectacularly.

Dead Planet is about, well, a dead planet. Something on it causes an anomaly that pulls ships out of hyperspace, stranding them in orbit. The longer people are there, the more they find themselves compelled to create strange sculptures. Eventually, the right sort of sculpture it made, forming a gate from which the Gaunt pour out, every hour on the hour (strong Dead Space vibes here).

There are a number of venues for exploration within: a drifting research ship with a dead crew and an ancient artifact pulled from the planet’s surface, a colony of self-cannibalizing survivors on the planet’s moon, a ruined military facility, a gate to the Dead Dimension and more. Each comes with a multitude of horrible fates and terrible solutions to the problem of being stranded. Dead Planet will test, and probably kill, you players exquisitely.

There is so much more. There are more random tables – for nightmares, for salvage, for mutations. There’s an absolutely brilliant method for generating random layouts for derelict ships.

It is so good. I can’t say it enough.